> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
> Sent: Saturday, July 21, 2007 4:54 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released
>
> Andrew Nagy schrieb:
> >
> > At the current moment, you can browse by clicking on the "Browse the
> Catalog" link in the footer of the page.
> > What that does is views the top 10 of a few categories.
> That's decidedly not what I was getting at. A true index will show
> _all_
> the entries, and specifically those that are not mainstream.
Yes, but has anyone invented a way to do this *well*? If you have 100,000 unique authors and you want to browse by author. Where do you start? You would need to incorporate subject headings, callnumbers, etc of the author to be able to narrow down. But this could be difficult if you have an author who writes both electrical engineering books as well as children's novels.
>
> > Trust me when I say: you do not want to have a list of all of the
> authors from your catalog. It will be a mile long. :)
> >
> That's entirely beside the point. I want to see _all_ the entries in
> the
> _vicinity_ of what I enter, be it a name, a title string, or (above
> all)
> a subject term. The vicinity, that's what's important for browsing,
> it's
> what browsing's all about - to find things you were'nt aware of they
> existed, or when got the spelling wrong or there are variant spellings.
I agree with this completely. How do we disseminate those really good books with really funky titles that won't match a typical title or keyword search?
I think browsing is very important and I want VUFind to be able to have an equally powerful browsing component complimentary to the searching component.
The browsing is just really tough to do really well.
Andrew
Received on Mon Jul 23 2007 - 13:18:40 EDT